The blob

It creeps and leaps and glides and slides across the floor right through the door ..... Don't forget to click the pics before it gets you.

This is just the kind of desolate location that in the movies has some monstrous creature crawl out of a cracked and smoking meteor half buried in the desert, and eats the guy that came out of his trailer just to see what was going on.

And in the next scene there's a small town sheriff and his deputy walking around the twisted trailer wondering what could've done that much damage to an RV.... And where's the old geezer that lived there?

If a meteor ever lands anywhere near the Arctic Fox in the middle of the night, rest assured I will not be the idiot that walks over and pokes it with a stick.

The other day I was rooting around in the Internet, which is a whole lot less effort than walking around in the desert, and someone was talking about that old movie named "The Blob."

I remember The Blob quite well. Not because it was a good movie, in fact it was the kind of movie that the actors in it probably denied ever having anything to do with the movie after they cashed their paychecks. The star of the movie, Steve McQueen, somehow managed to live it down and go on to become a big deal despite appearing in The Blob.

No, the reason the movie was a big thing to me is it became an important event in my young life. When the movie came out I was 11 or 12 years old, living in Simpsonville South Carolina, and almost every weekend my neighbor and best friend George and I would walk 10 miles into town to the Royal theater and watch the Saturday matinee. Okay maybe it was less than a mile, but to our little legs, it felt like 10 miles.

Little kid horror movies were very popular in the mid-50s, movies like The Thing, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Mummy, were all the rage for us, and we would spend days in school after watching one of these shows discussing which monsters were the scariest, and which ones kept us awake at night.

Most of us kids agreed that The Blob was very scary. Not because it was fast enough to catch us, because we were all good runners, it was the blob's ability to slide under doors and come through keyholes that kept us awake at night.  Suddenly the fireplace chimney that had brought us so much pleasure waiting for Santa Claus to come down had now become a portal of death thanks to The Blob.

 At the same time, me and every other kid in Simpsonville was watching The Blob, the rest of the world was inundated with news articles, and TV shows about a scientific event called the "International geophysical year" which was a cooperative effort of scientists from all over the world to study the earth and especially Antarctica. Even school teachers were talking about it in the classroom, so it was a really big deal back in the day.

Now you might think all that science stuff would have very little interest to a 12-year-old boy living in Simpsonville, South Carolina. Or have absolutely nothing to do with "The Blob." But in this case it did... Which I will talk about tomorrow because my story is getting way too long.

                                                theboondork

You don't often see a stature dedicated to a skateboarder. This kid looks like he's already on the chain gang.

Quartzsite has a city park. It's got baseball fields, a playground, and a skateboard park. I never in a million years would've guessed there was anyone in Quartzsite young enough to get on a skateboard. The wheel hadn't been invented until most Quartzsite residents were too old to ride a skateboard.